Cuba embraces the dollar The dollar roars back in Havana, and with it, social inequality
Policano, Joseph D
Joseph D. Policano CUBA EMBRACES THE DOLLAR But Castro isn't convertible Nothing I had read prepared me for my recent three-week stay in Castro's Cuba. I had visit-ed Havana forty years ago, as a...
...So in officially classless Cuba there are in fact two classes: Cubans who have access to dollars and those who don't...
...American products, or their European or Asian counterparts, are readily available (for dollars...
...We wasted our money when the Russians were buying our sugar and now we are broke...
...These are just some of the scenes I witnessed every day in Havana or Santiago de Cuba, the country's second-largest city, of a people for whom the simplest acts of ordinary life have become tedious or painful chores...
...Heroic photos of Fidel no longer dominate the streets or buildings in Havana or Santiago de Cuba...
...If the blockade ended tomorrow nothing would change unless we get dollars...
...Forty-eight hours later, it was still not repaired...
...What are we to make of Cuba...
...Because he has never done anything to hurt his people...
...Excluding Vaclav Havel and Nelson Mandela, Fidel is probably the most charismatic leader in the world today, surely the most romantic...
...state-owned shops sell quality merchandise, but only for dollars...
...I remember speaking in Amman a few years ago with a Jordanian college student, a Christian, who told me he would give his life for King Hussein...
...In a little-noted remark in a Time interview, he said the means of production for domestic consumption will always stay under state ownership-hardly the way to have American venture capitalists storming the beaches...
...Drug use rarer still...
...Medical care is readily available, though medicine for a nonlife-threatening illness is not...
...He has been quoted at great length about his willingness to "improve" socialism but says he refuses to alter his Communist principles...
...wealthy individuals have emerged in this Communist society and dominate many avenues of commerce...
...So I had to read up on the "new" Cuba...
...Fidel is still thought of as, well, Fidel...
...In a word that has become part of the language, Cubans invent...
...Most were workers or students, a surprising number of them teen-agers, who were using their bodies as the last resort for securing necessities for their children or luxuries like fashionable clothes for themselves...
...If both a husband and wife are lucky enough to be employed (and unemployment is becoming a major problem), their combined salaries are hardly enough...
...Aged liberals like myself remember the young man who overthrew a dictator, radicalized a reactionary country, brought ideals and idealism to the Caribbean, and thumbed his nose at the United States as he tried to bring social justice and economic well-being to his people...
...In the once-fashionable Vedado section of Havana, a sewage line had broken and was spilling onto the sidewalk...
...How much time does Castro have left...
...they want an apartment that isn't rundown or shared with their mother, father, grandparents, and, probably, married brothers and sisters...
...A historic figure who changed the life of the average Cuban in important ways, originally for the better, now for the worse...
...The billions of dollars the USSR poured into the country kept a badly managed and foolishly adventurist economy functioning...
...Hotels, restaurants, taxis are all priced in dollars...
...The former European Communist countries changed their leadership along with their system...
...The American blockade...
...There is as little freedom with Castro as there was under Batista...
...Not unless we have guarantees that the benefits will flow to Cuba's workers, giving them more buying power, and not into the pockets of the new Cuban elite already forming in Havana...
...Joseph D. Policano has served with the Peace Corps in West Africa and has traveled extensively in developing nations...
...I can't imagine a Cuban saying that about Castro...
...The demise of the Soviet Union spelled the collapse of Cuba's economy...
...Castro, the last rigid Communist leader outside of North Korea, has made the despised dollar Cuba's currency...
...A single foreign male in Havana may be forgiven if he thinks that prostitution is the city's number-one industry...
...corruption has become a way of life...
...But for most Cubans, life is the pits, especially if you don't have U.S...
...The blockade certainly keeps American tourists from going to Havana, but I wonder about its effectiveness in isolating Cuba...
...But perhaps change is afoot...
...There are many more black Cubans visible in high government positions than there are black Puerto Ricans in San Juan...
...Asian, European, Canadian, and Mexican businesspeople seem to be everywhere...
...dollars...
...But, they were quick to tell me, they don't want those gusanos (worms) from Miami back...
...Thin partitions separated the windowless rooms...
...an end to the interminable lines for everything...
...That invention may include buying and selling goods from abroad on the black market, getting dollars from relatives in the United States, driving gypsy cabs at night, doing odd jobs, or, less common though hardly rare, prostitution...
...Should the United States lift the blockade and reward Fidel for mismanaging the economy and punishing his people...
...I had visit-ed Havana forty years ago, as a weekend tourist, a trip I remember only for seeing one of Carmen Miranda's last performances...
...Democracy: Cubans want an end to rationing...
...Without Soviet money, Castro's economy is as skewed (and becomingjas corrupt) as Batista's...
...What Fidel really wants is American dollars...
...Serious crime is rare...
...Much of Havana, which was once among the world's loveliest cities, is in such a state of decay that even setting up a budget for restoration seems an impossible task...
...No one starves and literacy is high...
...A few hundred people lined up at 8:30 on a Sunday morning to await the 10:30 opening of Coppelia, the only popular ice cream parlor the regime has been able to open for Havana's million-plus citizens in nearly forty years...
...Is Castro capable of such change...
...While Cuba is not the color-blind society its supporters claim, it has abolished institutional racism...
...Castro and nearly forty years of communism have given most Cubans a standard of living comparable to West Germany's in 1949...
...These were not the hot-pants hustlers or pathetic crack addicts found in American cities...
...This was, she said, an improvement over her previous home...
...Since he still controls all the guns, as much time as he wants...
...Though the blockade has been in force for more than thirty years, the deprivations of the last five years are new...
...I found that phrases like "economic hardships," "special period," and "shortages" are antiseptic until one sees how they translate into actual living conditions...
...Even Israel, the only country to vote with the United States in the United Nations to keep the blockade in force, has an active trade program with Havana...
...They live by their ration book...
...I walked through mile after mile of central old Havana and saw not more than half-a-dozen well-maintained residential buildings...
...Neither one seemed uppermost in the minds of the Cubans with whom I spoke...
...Tenants filled large buckets and garbage pails during the time the water was on, or got their water from trucks...
...Cuban pesos are virtually worthless and were returned to me in disgust when I offered them as tips...
...That was then, this is now...
...Cuba's people are suffering...
...They want a job that pays money, not the $4 a month that the average Cuban earns...
...Yet nearly forty years of pro-Castro and Communist propaganda cannot be ignored...
...they want cars and gas...
...A crowd of sixty people pressed against an outdoor stand in a middle-class section of Havana, shouting, screaming-some good naturedly, most not-at two frazzled bakery clerks who had just received the weekly shipment of ordinary dinner rolls...
...A waiter at a restaurant for foreigners will earn more, perhaps twenty to thirty times more, than a physician or professor...
...As cramped and as crowded and as uncomfortable as it may be, everyone has some sort of a roof over his or her head...
...Then, democracy...
...In many of the buildings I visited, running water was erratic...
...They have to find other sources of income to get a little more meat, simple over-the-counter medications like aspirin, or to bring an occasional splash of color to their lives...
...and not unless Cuba's monolithic electoral process, modeled after the Soviet system, is replaced...
...In one twelve-hour period I was approached twenty-six times...
...Asian countries like China and Vietnam kept the same leaders but did a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree turn in economic philosophy...
...There was a toilet, but no bath...
...A working mother with two young boys was living in what was once a small store...
...The have-nots suffer a hard life indeed...
...Scarce vitamins, aspirin, meat, milk are all available for dollars...
...People were jammed shoulder-to-shoulder in open trucks under a 90-degree sun-teachers, students, nurses, the elderly, bureaucrats, laborers-being transported like animals to and from work as one "temporary" solution to Cuba's mass transportation problem...
...We don't have the money to buy them...
...I was told by a number of students at the University of Havana that "the products the Americans are keeping from us are available from other sources...
...Public photos of Che Guevara are more common, and representations of Jose Marti (1853-95), the poet and revolutionary leader, far outnumber Castro and Che combined...
...Amid all of this poverty, what did I learn about the two issues we read most about in the States, democracy and the American blockade...
...Castro rails against but uses it to hide the inefficiency and corruption of the regime...
Vol. 122 • September 1995 • No. 15
